


The Moments Between

by Deepdarkwaters



Series: Moments [1]
Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Bisexual Eggsy Unwin, Break Up, F/M, First Time, Friends With Benefits, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-03-04 10:12:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13362435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: Eggsy and Tilde break up. Merlin is the new Ginger. Percival tells Harry he needs to get on Grindr. Roxy's sleeping with TEQUILA? Everything is weird and nothing is easy - especially staying broken up when everything except good sense is against it, and finding Harry a boyfriend when he's terrified to try.





	The Moments Between

**Author's Note:**

> [Art by sarah-the-artiste on tumblr](https://sarah-the-artiste.tumblr.com/post/169683080274/my-work-and-you-eggsy-echoes-and-laughs)!
> 
> Thank you ataraxetta for hashing ideas out with me! x

"You wanna meet her?" Eggsy asks.

Behind him Harry's helping him with his parachute, tightening straps and fussing about. He's been agitated ever since they had to leave Merlin's bedside in the Statesman hospital, and having something to do is probably good for his state of mind. "Very much," he says quietly, his voice somewhere close to the back of Eggsy's left ear, "but not right now."

"Yeah." Harry reappears in front of him again and Eggsy attempts a smile. It's crooked and strained, but the one Harry gives him in return is an extravaganza of dimples and tired crows' feet, soft and warm, and for the millionth time over the last few days Eggsy feels this weird lurch of something missing in him - some sense of god or fate or whatever that he doesn't even believe in but feels like he should be thanking anyway for this fantastical, staggering change of fortune. "Three's a crowd and all that."

"So I've heard." They're already so close together that Harry barely has to take a step forward to embrace him; it's more of a _lean_ , a warm cling, the familiar scent of Eggsy's own Kingsman aftershave on the unfamiliar closeness of Harry's skin. He breathes it in, arms wrapped tightly around Harry's broad shoulders. There are things he wants to say, so many things, but maybe Harry can translate them for himself from the lingering, heavy silence. Besides - they've got years now. Forever. An entire recovered lifetime.

"Gotta go," he says eventually, and feels Harry nod before he takes a step back and hits the button on the wall of the Statesman plane to open the door. Far below them the illuminated palace and gardens are glimmering, reflected in the still water of the lake. "Fly safe, yeah? I'll be home tomorrow."

It's not really home; he doesn't have one of those any more, and neither does Harry. It's a mess they're going to have to figure out together.

 

* * *

 

Eggsy lands heavily on the lawn by the water's edge, fighting free of his parachute while a couple of bored-looking swans glance him over then glide away when they decide he's not interesting enough to waste their time with. The palace guards don't feel the same, apparently: they come racing across the grass with guns drawn, yelling in Swedish for a frustratingly long time and not letting Eggsy explain that he did call ahead, actually, and it's not his fault the message never filtered down.

Over their shoulders he sees movement, white and gold in the lamplight: Tilde is hurtling towards them from the palace, there's more Swedish yelling, the guards part like the Red Sea, and she launches herself at Eggsy with such force that he goes toppling over into the heap of silk again and brings her down with him.

"I'm sorry," he tries to say, and, "I love you," but she's trying to say it too, and neither of them are getting very far because kissing keeps getting in the way of the words. He rolls her over in the soft billows of parachute, forgetting completely that they're surrounded by guards with guns and curling Tilde's loose hair around his fingers, kissing her mouth and eyelids and the scatter of freckles across her perfect beautiful nose.

The sound of someone pointedly clearing his throat breaks them apart after a minute and Eggsy looks up, squinting in the bright glare of a guard's torch, to find the king and queen standing over them, panting and red in the face; they're clearly not used to chasing their daughter over the palace lawn in the middle of the night, nor to finding her rolling around in a crumpled parachute with an intruder.

"Eggsy," the king says.

Eggsy struggles to his feet, nudging his steamy glasses back up the slope of his nose with his knuckle and trying to straighten his hair. "Your Majesty."

And then the queen flings her arms around him, dragging him into the sort of hug he remembers from his own mother after countless times escaping arrest or Dean's temper. It's a wobbly, weird mix of fear and relief, and somewhere in there he feels the heat of her tears soaking into his collar and starts crying himself, silent and shaking and not even the slightest bit ashamed; he's only _tired_ , dizzy with gratitude, overwhelmed by everything already and pushed past tipping point by her kindness. Tilde puts her arms around them both, resting her head against the back of Eggsy's shoulder, and he feels the steady weight of the king's hand come to rest on the other.

"They saw your messages, I didn't tell," Tilde murmurs in his ear, and Eggsy twists a bit, finds her hand, wraps his fingers so tightly around hers that they'll need a crowbar to separate them. "They know you saved the world."

He gulps a bit, controls himself, tries desperately hard not to drop snot on the Queen of Sweden's silk dressing gown. "So they ain't gonna object when I ask you to marry me, right?"

"At this point, Eggsy," the king says, squeezing his shoulder manfully, "I think I'd be more broken-hearted than my daughter if you didn't."

But it's not that simple, and maybe the hysterics were at least in part because they both knew it.

It's still not enough to stop them tearing at each other's clothes the moment Tilde's door closes behind them. Eggsy bangs his legs off far too many pieces of unfamiliar furniture before he makes himself stop kissing and walking at the same time and pulls her by the hand - still linked, clinging with a sort of desperation he's afraid to examine because it's going to hurt so fucking much when they finally do - to her bed. This part, at least, is as familiar as his own reflection: the way Tilde's mulberry-silk hair fans around her face on the pillow; her teeth on her own lower lip, whitening it with the pressure; how slowly her blush always spreads, staining a soft band of pink right below her bright, lovely eyes. She roughs her fingers through Eggsy's hair as he's kissing a line down her body, directing his mouth between her legs and saying his name in a shuddering gasp when he slides two fingers inside her, and the first time she comes it's like that: pulsing around him and soaking his palm, crying his name in a broken stutter so it doesn't come out as his name at all, only a jumble of sweet, euphoric sounds.

"Here," Tilde says, breathless and glorious, tugging insistently on his hair until he stops rubbing his tongue in circles on her clit to drag out the aftershocks and shifts up to kiss her again. "Eggsy, _here_."

She gets the condom on him and he's inside her, then beneath her, fingertips pressing dents into the flesh of her hips and helping her ride him. With his eyes closed he can pretend they're at home, not the palace. The sheets feel the same - of course Harry would have a kingly taste in thread counts - and she smells the same, sweat and perfume, and she's riding his cock the same, but there's something unspeakable brewing like a storm in the air and Tilde looks just as unhappy about it as Eggsy feels.

"I love you," he tells her desperately - desperate because it's true, he's never meant anything more, and yet it's still not enough. Tilde sinks down onto his chest, kissing him fiercely, and when he finally comes it's with his arms so tightly around her back that his muscles hurt and her shaking voice in his ear: _I love you too, I'll always love you_.

 

* * *

 

On Merlin's living room carpet with his hand stuck in a Pringles tube trying to get to the last few crisps, Eggsy monotonously recounts the last of their morning conversation. "I said fuck it, I don't want it, this fucking job, Kingsman, Statesman, any of it, I'd jack it all in for her in a second. Learn Swedish and do charity work and make royal babies. And it weren't even a lie, I weren't exaggerating, I swear I would. And we'd be happy too. There's, like, different paths. That's one path. This is another one. They're parallel - Harry, are you even fucking listening? I'm telling you my parallel paths metaphor."

Harry's been silent for ages while Eggsy spewed everything out, picking kebab meat from between his teeth with one wooden prong of the chip shop fork, but his eyes come to rest on Eggsy's face and all at once he can feel Harry's entire attention enveloping him like some big invisible cloud. _Go on_ , Harry manages to say without saying anything at all, so Eggsy goes on, but he's kind of lost steam now. He finally retrieves the last four Pringles and slides the stack of them onto his tongue, letting the salt seep off the bottom one before he crunches through and swallows.

"Well, what does it even fucking matter now?"

"Don't leave me hanging, I love a good metaphor."

"Shut up." Eggsy's started on the canister of KP peanuts now and irritably throws one at Harry's head. Of course Harry catches it neatly in his mouth like a performing dog. "It's just, it don't matter how true it is, how she was happy here and I'd be happy there. It was never gonna work, not long-term. We both got these jobs we can't give two weeks' notice on and nope out of. Like, yeah these paths are pointing the same way but you can't walk along one foot on each cos that's fucking ridiculous. You gotta stop pissing about and pick one."

"She can't, but you could," Harry says. He does it in a careful sort of tone as though he's not quite sure it's the right thing to say. "You're a Kingsman agent, not an indentured servant. You're perfectly free to say thanks but no thanks and bugger off if that's what you want."

"Bullshit." Well, no - _technically_ he's right. There's no minimum service requirement, there's nothing chaining him to the job. But of all the people in the world, Harry's got to understand it better than anyone. "So I walk out on you and then what? I hear on the news about some terrorist shit I shoulda been there helping to stop? Or more likely I don't hear anything at all and go the rest of my life wondering what the tabloid headlines are really hiding."

He can't stop seeing Tilde's face in his mind: the exhausted dark smudges beneath her eyes and the particular way she always sets her jaw when she's dealing with something difficult, whether it's mending a leak under the kitchen sink or figuring out how to mutually break up with someone you'd die for. They'd cried so much all over each other that morning that it somehow became funny and they started laughing instead, and for a few magnificent moments it felt like nothing was wrong at all - Tilde clutched at him under the covers, arm draped across his bare chest, laughing with her mouth pressed against his shoulder and accidentally making a raspberry noise against his skin which made Eggsy laugh so hard he thought something might go pop in his brain. He caught a glimpse of his face in the dressing table mirror, swollen and hideous from crying and bright red from the choking gasping laughter, and the thought that daggered into his head then was as clear and sharp as crystal: _if this can't be saved, what hope is there for the whole fucking world?_

"Anyway," he says miserably, "I don't wanna talk about it."

Harry diplomatically declines to point out he's been talking about it for over an hour with barely a pause for breath. "Pass me the remote, then. Antiques Roadshow is about to start."

 

* * *

 

Rebuilding is a long and messy process, hampered for far too long by Statesman's pushy presence. They're providing the funds, Harry keeps reminding everyone in their temporary headquarters, but nine days in he disappears for several hours into his office with his phone and emerges at last with a satisfied smile on his face and something easier about his posture, as though weeks of tension have melted away like hoar frost.

He doesn't need to call for everyone's attention; he's had it since the moment the door reopened. "Well, I've managed to make Champ see sense at last," Harry says, as casually as if he's chatting with a couple of friends and not the anticipatory crowd of surviving agents and staff crammed between the rows of hastily-assembled temporary desks. "If he wants to finance a Scotch distillery that's his own business. We need to be in London. I'm very pleased to announce Kingsman will be reopening for business as soon as we find a suitable property."

There's a delighted whoop from the head tailor, who's been wandering round like a lost soul for the last week looking sadly at the curtains as though his hands are itching to cut them up for stock samples in the absence of real fabric, and someone else calls out, "What about headquarters?"

"I'll let you know as soon as I do." Then Harry scans the crowd, and cocks his head towards his office door when he finds Eggsy and Roxy. "Galahad, Lancelot, can I have a word?"

"Think it's a job?" Eggsy asks, getting down from his perch on the window ledge and straightening his jacket, and Roxy makes the same longing sort of sound in the back of her throat that she always does when Cate Blanchett's face appears in a magazine she's reading.

"Oh god, I hope so. I'm getting bedsores just stuck here."

"Lovely." He holds the door open and Roxy ducks under his arm and takes a seat in front of Harry's desk, kicking the other chair out beside her for Eggsy. "So how'd you get Champ to cave in? He's a nice guy but I'm pretty sure he ain't gonna be bossed around by you or anyone else."

Harry looks amused, pouring three cups of coffee from the pot on his sideboard. "There is a certain amount of power play going on, yes."

"Kinky." Eggsy accepts his cup - more cream and sugar than coffee, perfect - and warms his hands on the ceramic. "Let's have it, then."

"He's offering a blank cheque to top up our insurance payout on the condition that we give Agent Tequila one of our empty seats."

Coffee sloshes over Eggsy's hand and scalds it before Roxy quickly takes the cup off him and sets it down on the desk. "Harry, _no_."

"He's highly qualified. Weapons scores off the charts, speaks six languages fluently--"

"Yeah, all with a fucking Texas accent, I bet!"

"--and he's a tremendous fighter," Harry continues as though the interruption never happened. Then he does that mild, innocent, Disney princess thing with his face, the one that always signals the oncoming missile of a taunting comment, and casually adds, "Was it eight seconds it took to bring you and Merlin both down, or did you hold out as long as ten?"

Eggsy doesn't scowl, doesn't want to give Harry the satisfaction - or Roxy either, for that matter, who's doing a pretty fucking poor job of hiding her grin behind the rim of her coffee cup. She's heard this story a hundred times and for some reason has never seemed at all interested in making the clucking cooing sympathy noises he was hoping for.

"He's volatile. He tried to burn mine and Merlin's dicks off, in case you forgot."

"Nonsense. Scare tactics. You've employed them yourself on previous missions."

"Yeah, well, that was different."

"Was it?" Harry asks, sipping his coffee. "Would you have been any more accommodating if some mysterious person laden down with spy gadgets had infiltrated Kingsman?"

"No," Eggsy says tetchily, folding his arms and letting the scowl bloom. "Alright. I still think it's a massive mistake. He ain't--"

 _He ain't Kingsman material_ is what he almost says, and that's a fucking minefield he feels like he's going to have to examine very carefully in himself later.

"Whatever you think is best, Arthur," he says instead, politeness heaped on so thickly that it becomes sarcasm.

Harry seems content enough with this tantrum level, turning instead to Roxy. "Lancelot. I wanted to ask if your offer of Morton House still stands?"

"Of course," she says immediately. "I mean, it would be Percival who has the final say, obviously, but I believe I know him well enough to speak for him until he wakes up. He was never comfortable rattling around in there without Dad, anyway - he's deeply offended by the idea of one family owning that many staircases. Might as well give the place a purpose."

Eggsy sees her smile, the sad little quirk of it lifting the corner of her lips for just a moment, and feels a miserable lurch of shame at his own selfishness when Roxy's here with one dad killed on the job and one blasted into a coma when their London townhouse got obliterated and she never, ever gets pissy or feels sorry for herself or takes it out on anyone except whoever's holding her kick shield in the gym.

"And it would save a lot of time and trouble," Harry says, poking busily through some indecipherable pages of notes on his desk, "with James' shuttle link already built. A bit of roadworks on this end to divert the track when we find a new shop and we can get back to the business of kicking people in the head."

"Not you," Eggsy points out, retrieving some pages Harry's managed to accidentally shove off the desk and adding them back to the heap, where they just slide off in another direction instead. "Not being funny but Arthur seems like a shit job."

Harry's face is grim. "I'm starting to realise why Chester always looked like he'd caught his old chap in his trouser fly."

 

* * *

 

 _I'm in ldn for a conference tomorrow_ , Tilde texted a few weeks after they broke up. _Can we have dinner?_

"Can't decide if this feels weird or not," Eggsy says over their starters. It's not exactly true: it absolutely does feel weird, but he can't quite figure out the right words to make her understand he'd still rather be here than anywhere else in the world.

"It's pretty weird," Tilde says, smiling softly and sadly. She puts her fork down on her finished plate and reaches around her wine glass for Eggsy's hand, fingertips sliding over his knuckles and then his palm when he turns under her touch. "How is work?"

"Bit mental. We're doing up the new place, getting back to normal quick as we can."

"Normal," Tilde repeats quietly. Her eyes drop to her wineglass and she empties the contents into her mouth. "What a word."

Two hours later he's in her Ritz hotel room, Tilde's legs slung around his waist and his mouth sucking vivid bruises onto the white length of her neck that she's going to have to hide with a scarf tomorrow if she doesn't want the same old saucy comments from her PA. Her hand is hot and damp in his, fingers twisted tightly together; they've barely let go at all since that first touch at dinner, and Eggsy uses the grip to pin her hand on the pillows above her head while she's writhing beneath him. Her other hand finds his arse cheek to goad him into moving faster, harder inside her, and she only lets go of both hand and arse when Eggsy stutters her name and comes, when she cups his face in both palms and gives him a kiss so sweet and familiar that it almost makes him want to start sobbing again.

"This was honestly not my intention," she says later, curled against his side and drawing idle little patterns on his bare chest with her painted fingernail. "I wanted to see you. I didn't mean to..."

"What?" he murmurs, twisting to kiss her hair.

"Make this _blurry_. But I miss you so much."

"Babe, I miss you too."

There's silence for a while, nothing but the gentle sounds of their breathing and the barely-there rasp of Tilde's fingernail. Then she says, "It's alright, isn't it? This, separating, everything? Are you alright? I've been feeling terrible because I don't feel terrible unless I remember to."

He doesn't even have to think before he replies, he's been thinking about it all week. "Yeah. Like I wish it could be different but it is what it is. The way people fucking bang on in films and that, ohh it hurts so much I can't go ooon. Course you can fucking go on. That's life. Other shit matters too."

"Yes," she says quietly, kissing his shoulder. "Keeping busy. Missing you in the moments between."

 

* * *

 

The world keeps turning.

Governments all across the globe have worthwhile discussions about drugs in the wake of the mass murder plot, just like they had worthwhile discussions about the future of the planet after Valentine. There's lots of uncomfortable discourse online about good coming from bad and how in some ways these terrible things probably needed to happen for things to change. Eggsy doesn't go online much any more.

Over the next four months, he has two punch-ups with Agent Tequila, who's Agent Kay now, and sleeps with Tilde five times, Robert from accounts once, and Amelia twice.

Amelia's Merlin now, because Merlin is Ginger. Everything is weird.

Percival wakes up paralysed from the waist down but reasonably cheerful about it since it's better than being dead at least, and Harry practically begs him to take over as Arthur. Harry becomes Percival. People frequently use the wrong names around HQ, so everyone has to figure out who's being called or talked about from the context.

Daisy laughs all the time and rarely cries and is never, ever scared, the way her life always should have been. Eggsy's mum starts seeing a man who owns a bakery near their new place in Hampstead. He signs all his texts to her with a sparkly emoji heart and nervously asks Eggsy - the be all and end all of fashion, he seems to think, being a fancy tailor - if he looks alright every time he comes round to take Michelle out and Eggsy's there to babysit. He's nice.

Harry buys a little old house in Pimlico for a price that makes Eggsy's head ache, and they spend their rare days off trawling antique shops and auctions trying to replace all of Harry's favourite tat that was lost in the explosion.

Eggsy tells Harry stories about Tilde and JB, and Harry tells Eggsy stories about Mr Pickle.

There's a conspicuous gap that neither of them mentions for a long time: in Harry's memories of his old house, there's never another person.

 

* * *

 

"Eggsy," Harry says one morning in the break room of the new shop, "what's Grindr?"

" _Fuck_ ," is the first word Eggsy manages to splutter out once he's finished choking on his mouthful of Shreddies. "How'd you even know the word Grindr but not what it is?"

"Percival mentioned it might be of interest, but I suspected - correctly, I might add, from your reaction - that it's not something I ought to blindly google."

"Harry, _you're_ Percival."

"Arthur. Sorry."

"It's, like, this dating app thing for guys. You put your pic up and details and stuff and you can find out who's up for it close by."

Harry's nose briefly wrinkles. "And this is twenty-first century romance, is it?"

"Ain't really romance, half the time it's just dicks dicks dicks every direction. Alright if you like that kinda thing, I suppose."

"Do you?" Harry asks, sounding fascinated, then there's a flare of panic on his face before he smooths it out to his usual placid expression. "Please excuse a nosy old man. I'm merely wondering why Percival--"

"Arthur."

"--Arthur thinks it's something I'd be interested in."

"I dunno," Eggsy says, tipping his bowl up to drink the leftover milk, "presumably he thinks you'd be less crabby if you got a blowjob."

"Who wouldn't?" Harry says with a quite ridiculous amount of dignity, all things considered, and starts searching the cupboards for a pinky wafer to go with his tea.

 

* * *

 

The pub near HQ doesn't really know what's hit it. The landlady, Betty Baddock, has owned the place since the fifties and was used to the quiet pace of life here in rural Hertfordshire, the same old village regulars and the occasional rambler with a dog. Now the old manor house has become an office staffed by what is basically a couple of hundred functioning alcoholics, she seems more alive than she has in decades and spends her days bustling about with trays of pints and flirting outrageously with all the young bucks in their swish suits.

"Betty just pinched my bottom," Harry tells the others, setting a tray of drinks down on the table to a chorus of snorts and giggles. "I was all prepared to be offended, but then she called me a nice handsome young man and, well..." The jeering intensifies, and Harry shrugs as if to say _welp, I really am that easily bought_.

"Am I the only man here who's not been mildly assaulted by the landlady?" Robert from accounts asks mournfully. "Show of hands? Oh, that's ridiculous. Even you, Arthur?"

"What on earth do you mean, _even me_?"

"Well, you sit on your bottom all day," Roxy points out reasonably, tapping the leather arm rest of his wheelchair. "If she's getting right under there for a pinch, she's levelled up and needs to be stopped."

"Show of hands for who wants to stop talking about Arthur's bottom, please," Amelia says, pulling a face, and Eggsy puts up two.

"Yeah, let's talk about why Rob's so upset he ain't been groped yet by a hundred and twelve year old lady."

"I think you cursed me, honestly," Robert says to Eggsy, settling his face into a mock-scowl only decipherable as such because there's a glimmer of laughter in his eyes. "You, then this bloody _drought_."

"I dunno what to say, bruv. Suppose it's like going back to Next for your suits after your first bespoke, hey. You just can't face average no more once you've had the best."

"Oh my god," Amelia and Roxy say more or less in unison, and Amelia adds, "Well, I'm happy to report I've noticed no such curse, and 'best' is desperately relative."

"Seconded," Roxy says, clinking their glasses together and patting Eggsy sympathetically on the shoulder when he mimes being shot in the heart.

Arthur and Harry are beginning to look extremely rabbit-in-headlights about this conversation and like they'd rather be sitting at a different table. "In the olden days," Arthur says, sounding vaguely pained, "we talked about television and politics and books in the pub, and kept our bed-hopping private."

"Sounds shit," Eggsy says bluntly. "Anyway, I heard on the grapevine you keep telling people to get on Grindr, so you can talk."

Everything devolves into good-natured squabbling then, oiled along by another couple of rounds and a few shared baskets of chips. Betty comes out from behind the bar to light the open fire, giving her newest favourite a cheeky wink as she passes the table, and it makes Eggsy realise suddenly that Harry's been quieter than usual for the last hour or so.

"Alright?" he says quietly, nudging Harry's ankle with the side of his shoe to get his attention, and Harry smiles brilliantly with teeth and dimples from behind his glass of Guinness.

"Wonderful. You know, it's been so long since I spent this much time with friends in a pub."

"Couldn't prise me out the pub with a hammer and chisel a couple of years ago," Eggsy confesses. "Never actually drank that much, really, it was just nicer than being at home."

"Whereas I've always been more of a home drinker, myself," Harry says wryly. "Much better conversation there than with the berks in my local."

"Putting the world to rights with Mr Pickle?" Eggsy says, then kind of wishes he hadn't because the loss of him - his stuffed corpse, anyway - is still awfully raw for Harry even all these months later. But Harry just smiles again, using his fingertip to start drawing a spiderish sunburst pattern on the table in a tiny puddle of someone's spilled drink, and shrugs.

"Yes. And Merlin, quite often." He glances down the table at Amelia, laughing behind her hand at something Arthur's saying. "Hamish, that is."

"Do you miss him? I miss him fucking loads. Kinda never really realised how much he was always just _there_ til he weren't no more."

"Yes, I know what you mean." Harry falls silent for a little while, until Robert claims a round and then he says, "No, thank you, no more for me - oh, bugger it, just a half, then." He waits until Robert's out of earshot, then raises his eyebrows enough to wrinkle his forehead and leans towards Eggsy over the table. "By the way, and I don't want this to sound nosy or feel like I'm overstepping a boundary, but I'm glad to see you happier lately."

"Happier," Eggsy repeats blankly, even though he kind of gets it.

"Sowing your wild oats and so on."

"Don't, fucksake - you sound like a proper old grandad when you talk like that."

"I'm just saying." Harry raises his hands defensively. "I'm sure it's both none of my business and much more complicated than it seems."

"Tilde is, yeah. The oat sowing, I dunno, there ain't really too much to that. Just go with the flow." Harry's got this weird knack of being able to make people feel the full weight of his attention as though it's an actual physical pressure, and Eggsy can feel it settling on him now: it's like the rest of the pub is quieter, suddenly, like Harry's conjured some kind of force field around them.

"Something on your mind?" Harry asks gently

"Something on yours?" Eggsy shoots back, feeling defensive as well for some reason, though it only makes Harry smile a bit ruefully and sit back in his armchair with the new half-pint of Guinness that Robert sets down in front of him.

"It seems a very _millennial_ kind of thing, this openness you all have about relationships and - and fluidity of inclination and so on." He keeps waving his elegant hand in the air when he talks, as though he'll be able to pluck the words he's fumbling for right out of the nothingness. "I envy your generation that very much."

"Well, what's stopping you? There ain't no age limit on self-discovery."

"I'm afraid it's true what they say about old dogs and new tricks."

"Bollocks," Eggsy tells him fiercely, punctuating the word with a finger jabbed right in front of Harry's face. "You learnt how to use Snapchat and hang your own wallpaper this year, you can fucking well learn this too."

Roxy, always a hilarious mixture of affectionate and competitive when she's a little bit drunk, drops a kiss on top of Eggsy's head as she's pushing past his chair to go and batter Kay at darts in the far corner.

"Me and Rox only did it one time and it was shit," Eggsy says, leaning in a bit so he doesn't blare her business all over the pub. "After the parachute test. The guys who got kicked out were being proper babies slamming their shit around the room packing to go, so we left them to it and just walked round the corridors for a while, ended up hiding in one of the linen cupboards upstairs cos Arthur was wafting about with a face on and we didn't feel like being polite. Then it just kinda happened, right up against the door like a shit porno. If she weren't such a fucking perfect gentleman everyone in this place would know me as Three Minute Eggs now."

Harry looks very slightly shellshocked. "Well, thank you for confiding in me," he says and chugs the rest of his Guinness like he needs it to steel himself. "Have you talked about this with your doctor? I'm sure there's something they could do."

"About...? _Oh_ ," Eggsy interrupts himself when he realises, and throws a cold chip at Harry across the table. "Harry! I'm alright when I ain't just been chucked out a plane without a parachute, my nerves were shot."

"Ah." He relaxes slightly, though he's still rolling his empty glass between his fingers as though he wishes he'd gone for the full pint after all. "Yes, well. I'm hardly in a position to offer sex advice, I'm afraid, so I'm pleased to know you can handle this one yourself. Er, so to speak."

It's much, _much_ warmer in here suddenly. Betty's going to burn the place down if she doesn't stop fussing with the fire as an excuse to gaze adoringly at Harry every time she passes their table.

"What you told me on the plane way back when," Eggsy says quietly, watching Harry's face and the unhappy twist in his mouth, "you really meant all that?"

"For heaven's sake, Eggsy, surely you know me well enough by now."

Eggsy considers it for a minute, jumbling his thoughts into order, and finally says, "I know you wouldn't lie to me. So yeah, you meant all that." Harry inclines his head just slightly, _correct_. "Okay, let me get this. I know you like guys, and it ain't exactly a secret else Arthur wouldn't have joked about Grindr, but it ain't something you shout about neither cos I think I know you pretty well and I never knew til then."

Harry's eyes are dark and soft, something almost hangdog-like about his expression. An unexpected flare of anger curls in Eggsy's stomach suddenly: not at Harry, but at a world and all the people in it who seem to have made things so fucking unnecessarily difficult for him.

"I read some of your honeypot reports in training, I know you been with women. But--"

"LAST ORDERS," Betty bawls from the other side of the room, clanging the bell strung up above the bar and thoroughly shattering the moment.

 

* * *

 

A WhatsApp conversation on Eggsy's way to a mission in Chile:

 _Papa's planning a ball for President Fox on her visit later this year. We've been talking a lot about the drug law reforms, it's wonderful. I'm speaking at the UN next week x_ _  
_ _I wish I could tell her about you and everything you did x_

Aw babe amazing, lmk how it goes?  
And nah can't have presidents sticking their faces in!!! Never get anything done if they did lol x

_I know! I would never tell. But it seems so unfair not to be recognised x_

Idk it don't bother me tbh. Spy life :D if ur doing it for thanks ur doing it wrong x

_Will you come to the party? X_

Depends if I get an invite lol x

_Where should I send it? Have you found a house yet? X_

Could send it to my mums I can pick it up from there x  
Be nice to see u again :)  
Not yet been crashing in hq and Harry's spare room mostly x  
He's lonely x

_:( I still want to meet him x_

Invite him too x  
U know any guys who might want a go on him?? Been thinking abt trying to set him up x  
He needs a bf, p sure he's never actually been with a bloke x  
Actually p sure he fancies Hamish but idk what to do about that x

_Harry and everybody else in the world x_

Yeah ngl might've had a crafty wank or two about him in training lmao x  
When his eyes go all narrow when he's cross uhhhhhhh x  
Course then I got to know him haha cured me x  
Top bloke tho absolute diamond x  
Babe I keep seeing ur typing then u don't send? X

 _Sorry x_ _  
_ _I miss him. And Roxy, Ryan, Jamal, Liam, Daisy, your mum. Of course Brandon._

:( xx

_I fitted so perfectly into your life._

Babe call me x  
Gonna be in the air 4 more hours at least, let's talk x

_It's easier to type x_

Ok x

 _It wasn't really perfect, was it? X_  
_Like children playing house x_  
_When I went to university I felt normal for the first time in my whole life._  
_I shared a flat and I cooked bad food and had parties and friends and sex and hangovers._  
_Later I found out my roomie, my best friend, was a bodyguard Papa planted to watch me._

No way :(

 _I found out when she went all Wonder Woman on a kid who tried to steal my purse in the street._  
_I think Papa meant well._  
_But all it did was make years of my life feel fake._

Shit that's fucking brutal :(  
Fwiw nothing I ever said or did was fake, not to u :/ x

 _I know x_ _  
_ _Sorry, I'm saying everything wrong xx_

No I kinda get it, backwards fairy tale x  
Princess wants to be Cinderella for a bit x  
I didn't want to be me neither, p sure I was trying to be Harry x  
Both failed lol, u was always a princess to me even when u farted in bed xx  
And I could never be Harry even if I try for 500 years

_You're better. You always put yourself down x_

Yeah well u ain't met Harry yet lol  
Ur typing not sending again ur making me nervous lmao x

 _I can't word anything right. This would be easier in Swedish!_  
_I'm trying to say_  
_Even if it was like children playing house_  
_God, did you ever in your life mean anything as much as the games you played as a child?_

 

* * *

 

A WhatsApp conversation on Eggsy's way home from a mission in Chile:

_Arthur talked me into a blind date yesterday._

???????????????????? HARRY TELL

 _It turned out to be Robert from accounts._ _  
_ _Sad trombone noise._

Lmaoooooooooooo fuck  
Tell me everything  
What did u wear  
Where did u go  
Did u kiss him  
Are u ok

_My taupe Prince of Wales check._

Nice very nice  
Classic but not fusty  
What tie????

_The navy Tudor square motif._

YES Harry. Ok go on

 _Lunch at a grotty little Italian place with superb wine. I had fettuccine with pancetta and dandelion greens. 8/10, a little too salty._  
_I did not kiss him._  
_I am ok._

Oh I feel deflated now lmao  
Sorry it weren't great :(

_It was a perfectly nice lunch and he's a pleasant enough fellow to spend time with._

But no spark

_No spark. Not to mention he's terribly young._

Lmao he's like 37??

_You don't think that's terribly young, considering that I'm 105?_

Shut up u don't look a day over 84  
Better luck next time mate, plenty more fish etc  
Hey u don't have to answer if u don't want  
But was that ur first date  
??

_With a man, yes._

Well that's p cool then, 1st hurdle passed :)  
U with all ur old dogs new tricks talk

_I don't know about that. I feel extremely uncomfortable about the whole experience._

:(  
Like Rob in particular or dating in general or ????  
Seeing guys?  
U know it's ok right? It ain't the 80s no more?

_With respect, you can't possibly know what the 80s were like._

No I know  
Sorry didn't mean to be flippant  
But WITH RESPECT I know what it's like now  
Ok you might get dirty looks off some dickhead in the street  
But stg ppl don't really give a shit not in ldn anyway  
This is like the safest city in the whole world to do wtf u want

_Eggsy, please. Why on earth would I fear for my safety with over eleven hundred kills on my record?_

Idk  
Idk what ur issue is tbh  
Like yeah I get it's scary trying sth new  
But u do scary shit all the time u know?  
I mean that's ur job it's what ur best at  
Idk why this is different

_To put it bluntly, I have never slept with a man. The idea of fumbling around with an attractive stranger who expects me to know what I'm doing is utterly horrifying._

Oh wow ok  
Yeah I mean I get why ur nervous  
But everyone has a first time u know??  
Like literally everyone who's ever shagged someone had a first time

_Of course, but I expect it's usually at an earlier age than 55._

So what  
Bet there's 1000000s of blokes figuring out they're gay late in life  
Roxy's dad was married to a woman for years him and Arthur only got together when she was like 15  
No way ur the only one

 _I've always known but there was never a convenient time to examine it._  
_I honestly feel as though the moment for experimentation has passed, and I'm at peace with that._  
_At least I was until Arthur started meddling._

Convenient time lmao p sure there's no such thing  
U just like someone and mould the whole world round trying to be near them  
Don't always work but u try  
Anyway who says u have to go and bang a stranger  
Find someone u like and take it slow  
Then by the time u get round to toad in the hole he won't gaf u don't know what ur doing

_This conversation ended with the words "toad in the hole"._

Lmaooo sorry Harry  
Ok look we don't have to talk about it if u don't want  
But ur not past it and u deserve to be happy  
Chin up mate x

_:)_

 

* * *

 

There's something ridiculously domestic about living with Harry - which is essentially what he's doing, even though they're both going along with the pretence that he intends to move out as soon as he finds a place of his own. There was barely time to process Harry's miraculous resurrection while they were working on taking down Poppy and then rebuilding Kingsman, but now things have settled back to something approaching normal and the weight of it all sometimes stamps down full force on Eggsy's foot when he's least expecting it. What that happens, he's found it passes so much more easily when Harry's within reach - when Eggsy can just call upstairs to see if he wants a cuppa, or follow the sound of scampering little feet to find Harry sliding across the hallway floorboards on his knees playing tug of war with Glenfiddich the puppy.

"You wanna hear some gossip?" Eggsy says grimly one afternoon when Harry opens the front door for him.

"I live for it, as you well know. Would you like me to take some of those?"

"No way." He edges through the door sideways, five Sainsburys bags straining in his left hand and six in his right and a multipack of Andrex dangling from his teeth by its stretching plastic handle. "Real men bring shopping in alone, in one trip, or die."

"How brave and noble of you," Harry says, just a hair's breadth away from rolling his eyes, and leads the way to the kitchen so he can help unpack. "Do I need to be sitting down for this gossip? Do we need a drink...?"

"I'm just gonna rip the plaster off. Roxy's going out with _Kay_."

"Would you like some brandy to calm your nerves?" Harry asks, taking two tins of spaghetti hoops out of Eggsy's hands and stacking them away before patting him kindly on the shoulder. "It must be a dreadful blow."

"Alright, no need to be a sarky bastard! _Kay_ , though. Of all the fucking people in the world."

"I wasn't aware that Roxy needed your stamp of approval on her partners."

Eggsy can feel his face twisting into a grimace and throws a block of cheddar across the kitchen at Harry, who catches it neatly and slides it into the fridge beside him. "Didn't mean it like that. She can bang who she wants. I just think he's a nob."

Harry catches, in quick succession, a packet of corned beef, a wrapped string of sausages, and a small bucket of yogurt, putting them one by one into the fridge. "Want to know what he thinks of you?"

"No," Eggsy snaps, but Harry knows him well enough by now to hear a yes in disguise.

"He's asked me repeatedly how he might make amends with you. Terribly frustrated that he does all his polite southern yes ma'ams and no sirs to everyone he meets and yet he's still not as popular around headquarters as you are. I've tried explaining you're a near-perfect gentleman to everybody except him, but as you can probably imagine it's a difficult truth to believe from where he stands."

Harry's speciality: an extremely mild telling-off that feels like being killed with one of those medieval spiked balls swinging on a chain.

They put away the rest of the shopping in a vaguely awkward silence and stow the bags in the bag already full of bags under the sink. Then Harry goes to finish whatever weird nature documentary he paused when Eggsy got home, and Eggsy goes for a sulk in the shower.

He feels better when he's done - it's difficult not to feel cosy and happy in warm clean pyjamas, coming downstairs to find a plate of cheese and beans on toast and a Corona waiting on the coffee table. The silence while they eat is companionable now, broken here and there by a snort of laughter at the panel show on telly or telling Glen to bugger off when he tries to steal a toast crust.

Eventually, after approaching forty minutes since they last spoke, Eggsy says, "Hey. Sorry I'm a dickhead."

Harry blinks at him. "I never said you were."

"Not in them exact words, no." Eggsy takes the empty plate off Harry's lap and stacks it on the coffee table with his own, twisting a bit on the sofa to look at him. In the glow from the telly and the lamp in the corner, Harry looks soft and handsome and slightly concerned, eyes roving Eggsy's face as though he's searching for something there. "If Kay's good enough for you and Rox he should be good enough for me, right?"

"I think you have a lot in common," Harry says, tactfully avoiding a direct answer. "I suppose it's not surprising that your getting along hasn't come naturally. Often it doesn't when two people are very alike."

"Opposites attract," Eggsy says automatically, and Harry's head tilts just slightly like Glen when he hears the postman.

"Quite," he says softly. "That must be why I'm so wretchedly fond of you both."

And there are things Eggsy wants to tell him - _I don't hate him cos we're alike or even cos he beat me and Merlin up, I hate him cos he threatened you_ \- and things he's vaguely wanted to do ever since that fight Harry picked with Dean's goons in the pub - kiss Harry right on the flecks of evening stubble he can see glinting silver in the lamplight on his cheeks and chin, kiss him on the disgusting little missed smear of bean sauce above his upper lip - but he just drinks his beer and turns back to the telly and tries to understand what everyone's laughing about.

No - the kiss happens later, when Eggsy's a few beers down and feeling cocky.

"Who's more fit, me or Kay?"

Harry's mouth quirks like he's fighting off a smile. "You'd win in a race. He's stronger."

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure you know that ain't the kind of fit I mean."

"To be perfectly honest, neither of you are really my type."

"Fucksake, just answer the question!"

"Well, of course it's you," Harry says, exasperated as though it's the most stupid, obvious thing he's ever been arm-twisted into saying. "You belong on a billboard in your underwear, shot by Mapplethorpe."

"Hah," Eggsy says, triumphant. The silence that follows feels like an expanding balloon, something stretching tighter and tighter between them. Eggsy's not laughing now, it's not a laughing sort of moment: it's the sort that requires a capital letter and italics, _a Moment_ , and he can feel his heart thudding a drumroll to herald it in.

"Who's more fit," Harry asks carefully, "me or Kay?"

"Oh my god," Eggsy says, because screaming _you_ in Harry's face seems like it might be a bit forward.

It must show anyway, because Harry makes an aborted movement with his hand as though he meant to touch Eggsy's cheek and then clenched his fist to stop himself. "May I kiss y--"

" _Yes_ ," Eggsy interrupts, so giddy so suddenly that he feels breathless and tingly. A full-body shiver rockets through him when Harry's hand picks up its abandoned path and finds his face, thumb caressing his cheekbone, fingers bypassing his ear to slide gently through his damp hair. He sees Harry's eyes flicker to his mouth and reflexively swipes his lower lip wet with his tongue, and Harry makes a quiet, injured sort of sound deep in his throat in the second before he draws Eggsy closer for a kiss so trembling and tentative it's like he doesn't really want to do it at all.

"Harry," Eggsy murmurs. He pulls back a little way, still so close that their noses are nudging against each other. "It's just a mouth. No big deal. You kissed women before, right? You got this."

Harry kisses him again instead of replying, and it's better this time, sweet and sure, a thrilling little hint of tongue and the shift of Harry's thumb on Eggsy's cheekbone again to tilt his face where he wants it. Eggsy finds himself stroking his fingertips across Harry's cardigan, crumpling the cashmere and tracing the breadth of his shoulders. If this were any other bloke he liked half as much as he likes Harry he'd be swinging a leg over now, going in for a proper face-suck and maybe a bit of grinding to test the waters, but Harry - the bravest person Eggsy thinks he's ever known - seems even now as though he might suddenly startle and run away like a spooked cat. Eggsy stays perfectly still instead, lets him lead, breathes in the warm air that Harry's breathing out through his nose, and waits to see what happens.

Harry stops eventually at the sound of the adverts playing louder than the telly show as always - not all at once, not tearing away and going for the remote to turn down the volume like he usually does, but slowly, trailing off to a final little suck on Eggsy's lower lip. Eggsy's never seen him this flushed before, a stain of pink spreading across his cheekbones and something bright and hot and feverish in his eyes.

"Right," Harry says. His eyes stutter back to Eggsy's mouth as though drawn there by magnets, and he draws him back for one more kiss, gentle and curiously chaste, like he's reluctant to stop but not sure if it's okay to keep on taking.

"Right," Eggsy agrees. He feels the mad urge to _giggle_ suddenly and fights it back. "Sooo. That was nice."

"Yes."

"And. Unexpected."

"Yes," Harry says again. He rubs the pad of his thumb  across his mouth. "Me or Tilde?"

"Tilde," Eggsy says simply, because he's never messed anybody around and he's fucking not about to start with Harry. It's the right answer, apparently; Harry smiles softly like he was expecting it, or at least for some reason hoping for it. "I mean. If you wanna kiss me, bring it on. Ain't no secret I'm mad about you, and me and her are done. But if she walked in here right now going hey let's give it another chance I'd be gone." Cautious gamble time: "Like, if Hamish comes back for a visit and if you ever get the balls to tell him and if he feels the same you best not think I'm sleeping in that guest room no more with your bed banging against the wall."

"That's a lot of ifs," Harry says, conspicuously and deliberately not denying it.

"Alright, then." Somewhere in all of that Eggsy's fingertips came to rest on Harry's sleeve cuff, and he turns Harry's forearm over to stroke gently down from the cashmere to the lines on his palm. "So we know we ain't each other's first choice. And I ain't really in the right place to want a boyfriend or nothing anyway. Don't mean I don't love you."

"I love you too," Harry says. The words sound strange in his mouth, clumsy and uncomfortable, but there's nothing off about the familiar warmth and amusement in his eyes. "With similar caveats. What a fucking mess."

There's not much more to add to that, so Eggsy shuffles about on the sofa until he's comfortable with his head in Harry's lap and Harry's fingers combing idly through his hair, and he falls asleep to the grim blare of the ten o'clock news.

 

* * *

 

"He makes me laugh," Roxy says defiantly as she's wrapping her hands in the gym ready to spar.

" _I_ make you laugh!"

"He makes me come," she counters with a grin of pure evil on her face, and Eggsy groans, defeated.

"You ever gonna drop that?"

"Absolutely not. Come on." She steps onto the mat and raises her fists. "Imagine I'm him if you're going to keep being a baby about it. Maybe you'll finally beat me."

 

* * *

 

Harry's first time creeps up on him, on both of them, and happens on a normal boring weekend morning off.

"Are you decent?" Harry calls through Eggsy's bedroom door after knocking. "I've just taken your washing out of the dryer."

"Um," Eggsy says, breathing unsteadily with his dick wet in his hand, halfway through a lazy Sunday morning wank. "Not really decent, to be honest. But, I mean, if you wanna come in you can."

There's a short silence, then the door opens and Harry's head pops in. " _Oh_ ," he says, sounding faintly scandalised like Eggsy didn't give him a fair warning. "Bloody hell, you're really not decent at all, are you?"

"What the fuck are you doing washing for at half seven in the morning on a Sunday anyway?" He sits up a bit in bed, wiping his messy lubed hand on the sheet and watching Harry dump the basket full of whites in its place in the corner to be sorted. Harry, when he's done, turns around and watches him right back, eyes travelling slowly from the covers crumpled around Eggsy's mid-thighs to his sweating face and pinched-pink nipples and the hard heavy curve of his cock, the wet head of it dripping a drool of precome onto his belly.

"I've never been a fan of a prescribed day of rest." Harry's knuckles are white, he's clenching his fists so tightly at his sides, and Eggsy wants to know _why_ \- wants to know what he's thinking, how much he wants to touch, and where, and exactly how. "It seems I'm not the only one."

"Harry." Harry tears his gaze away and looks at Eggsy's face, jaw set and something hungry and almost like a challenge in his eyes.

"You needn't stop."

"Are you staying? Front row seat with your name on it." Eggsy nods at the armchair in the corner, draped all over with clothes he's too lazy to put away properly, but Harry surprises him by ignoring it and coming to sit on the edge of the bed instead.

"I'd rather lurk about in the wings if it's all the same to you."

He's never been looked at this intently before. Tilde used to love to watch him get himself off, especially over Skype while he was halfway around the world during mission downtime, but it was always funny and silly and weirdly sweet, lots of teasing and laughter and disparaging comments about strange hotel decor. Harry's _studying_ him, eyes roaming every inch of Eggsy's bare body; if he had his glasses on, Eggsy might think he was being mapped and uploaded to a server somewhere. It's kind of unnerving, though his traitorous show-off cock seems not to have any problems with it at all and even blurts out another happy little drop of precome to prove it, which makes an odd, gorgeous sigh get stuck in Harry's throat.

"For some time now I've been desperately distracted at night by the idea that you might be doing this just a wall away." He reaches out his hand, hesitates, then carries on at Eggsy's raised eyebrows and encouraging nod to stroke one fingertip gently through the trail of hair and glisten of precome below Eggsy's navel.

"You get off thinking about it?" Eggsy asks, barely breathing as he watches and feels Harry's sliding finger creep lower on every soft downstroke.

"Sometimes."

"Which hand? I wanna picture it."

"Right." His right hand is curled into a loose fist resting on his thigh and Eggsy reaches for it, stroking carefully over his knuckles and the raised topography of veins.

"You use spit, or...?"

"Lubricant, usually." Harry meets his eyes again, blushing a bit but defiant and unafraid. "Bought from Superdrug in a moment of optimistic courage the day after you kissed me."

"You kissed _me_ ," Eggsy corrects him. "And you should feel free to do it again any time you want, like maybe right now."

The bedroom air is cool on his sweating legs when Harry drags the covers away, leaving him completely naked from head to toes. There's something inexplicably delicious about being covered up again right away: the rasp of Harry's socks against his feet and trousers against his legs and the linen shirt and neat little line of buttons against Eggsy's chest, heaving there under the press of Harry's body like a bodice-ripper heroine. Eggsy's cock is trapped between them, shifting maddeningly against the fabric while Harry kisses him like it's the end of the world. He can feel Harry getting hard too and wriggles helplessly beneath him, trying to squirm into a position that settles them together where it matters most, pinning Harry to him with his feet wrapped around the back of Harry's thighs.

"You wanna take your clothes off?" he says, or tries to say, losing half the words in Harry's mouth, and gets a head-shake _no_ in reply before he feels Harry's hand working its way in between their bodies to wrap those long, elegant, beautiful fingers around his cock. "Harry, fuck, I'll come, you gotta give me a minute."

"I want you to." Harry kneels up suddenly between Eggsy's legs, and Eggsy almost whines out loud in dismay at the loss of him, the heat of his body and bulging cock and the scrape of buttons against his burning skin. Then he whines out loud for a different reason altogether: Harry's unbuttoning his own trousers and easing his cock out of his underwear, though it must be more for comfort now he's so hard than an intention to use it. As as soon as it's done his hands are on Eggsy again, fingers spread wide across his hips as Harry shuffles awkwardly down the bed on his stomach to press a hesitant kiss right at the ridge of muscle where Eggsy's thigh meets his body. "Is it safe to assume that sucking a prick is fairly self-explanatory?"

"Holy fuck. Yeah, pretty much." Eggsy's trembling fingers find Harry's hair, a soft tumble of curls this early in the morning without all his usual outside-the-house fancy expensive projects smoothing it down. "Just mind your teeth," he says shakily, "and ignore anything you ever seen in porn. You don't have to go right down. I never do, scared I'll puke. And you don't have to suck like a Maccy D milkshake, mostly it's just the friction."

"Thank you," Harry says, so gravely polite in his concentration that Eggsy feels a mad bubble of laughter try to rise and has to will it away - then he's got no breath or strength for anything at all except a wobbling wordless moan at Harry's mouth on him, licked-wet lips opening in a circle around him and sucking carefully at the head of his cock. Harry's hand covers what's not in his mouth, spit dribbling down between his fingers as he figures out some kind of sucking-stroking rhythm that makes Eggsy's spine fizz.

"I mean it," Eggsy says, half-slurred with pleasure, "I'm gonna come any second, you gotta stop if you don't want a face full," but Harry looks up at him and fucking _smiles_ around the dick in his mouth like he's never been happier in his entire life so when Eggsy comes cursing and bucking over the back of Harry's tongue it's entirely his own fault.

Harry is ridiculous in the aftermath, fucking incredible: swiping the spills from his chin into his mouth and sucking greedily at all his fingers. He's utterly unselfconscious about it, the same way he behaves when they order barbecue ribs and wings to eat in front of the telly on nights they're both feeling too lazy to cook, though he does eventually realise Eggsy's watching him like a starving tiger about to pounce and turns the last few fingers into a lingering, elaborate show.

"Fucking hell," Eggsy says stupidly. He twists to wipe his sweaty forehead on the pillow, palm pressed to the thundering bang of his heart, and he watches Harry smirk like Satan around his own messy thumb, cheeks hollowed, sucking the last of Eggsy's come from his skin. "Gimme like ten minutes, you thirsty for more of that I got fucking gallons."

Harry's fingers are wet with spit when he reaches for Eggsy's waist again, the tips of them sliding and fitting into the grooves between his muscles like they were made to go there. He's breathless and blushing, and - ridiculously - still wearing his glasses, at least until Eggsy fumbles down to drag them off his face and clatter them onto the bedside table. "May I kiss you?" Harry asks again, just like the first time, and Eggsy rockets up to meet him, to suck the lingering taste of his own come off Harry's needy tongue.

"You don't have to ask every time, just fucking do it, do anything you want." The hand that squirms and inches between the mattress and Eggsy's skin then shouldn't be a surprise but it still kind of is - Eggsy laughs at it not because anything's funny, but because this surging roar of love he feels for Harry right now in this moment has no other outlet as that absurd huge gorgeous hand goes right in for a grope of his bare backside. Eggsy wriggles down into it, breath tumbling in silly shocked laughter out of him when Harry's left hand finds the other cheek too and _tugs_ , hauling Eggsy halfway into his lap.

"Anything?" he says. It's almost like a challenge, sort of like a plea. Eggsy can feel the hot, hard length of Harry's cock butting up against his belly, the wet tip of it smearing against the line of hair there, and his mouth just fucking floods with saliva at the thought of this actually happening right here, right now.

"Yeah. You ain't going in dry but you're fucking going in." He reaches between them for Harry's shirt buttons, slipping them rapidly through the holes and fighting to get the fabric off his broad shoulders. He's seen Harry with no clothes on a hundred times before in the gym showers or coming out of the bathroom in just a towel or his ludicrous dressing gown with the V open almost to his naked waist, but it's never been this close up before - never within touching distance like this, never with the permission to touch. He slides his fingers from Harry's collarbones downward, scraping through the greying fuzz of hair over his pecs and over half a dozen scars whose stories he doesn't know, down and down the nine miles of his body to curl around the head of his cock where it's pressed between them. "Trousers off, johnny on. Chop chop."

"Are you always this bossy in bed?" Harry asks, unfurling himself from the bed and onto his feet with a grace so perfect that it looks choreographed. "Not that I'm complaining, you understand."

"Oh yeah?" Eggsy says, grinning idiotically as he finds his lube in the mangled folds of the sheet and squeezes a cold wet mess of it all over his fingers. "That what you like, is it, being bossed about by some gobby youth?"

"Well, I don't know. Apparently it is." Even Harry can't look elegant taking his socks off, a blip in his perfection that Eggsy enjoys enormously. "Where are they?"

"In the drawer." Harry doesn't make a move to find his condom, he seems transfixed by the motions of Eggsy's wet fingertips circling and pushing between his sprawled legs. "Harry. You just gonna watch or actually get involved?"

"Get involved," Harry says hastily, and rummages through the mess in the drawer until he grabs the condom box and fumbles one out, tears into it, rolls it onto his cock without seeming to look away from Eggsy for more than half a second. Then for the first time he kind of falters, something hazy and soft and very close to scared in his expression, and Eggsy holds his hand out until Harry takes it gratefully and grips it between both of his own, clinging and warm.

"Don't overthink it. You alright?"

"Quite alright."

"We don't have to. This ain't a race or a checklist or whatever, if you don't wanna do it we--"

He stops abruptly at the lurch of the mattress, Harry taking up his old place on his knees between Eggsy's spread thighs. "Explain to me what you're doing here," Harry says a bit shakily, gesturing down between them where the first joint of Eggsy's middle finger is pressed inside. "Obviously I understand the mechanics. But..." He trails off, frowns slightly, then looks like he's trying to hold back a grin. "I was going to say something about appreciating some insider knowledge, but under the circumstances I hardly think that's appropriate."

"You're a fucking menace," Eggsy tells him severely. "How the fuck am I meant to do you a speech on fingering when you're distracting me like this?"

Harry silently takes the lube from him, soaks his own hand, and starts stroking Eggsy's half-hard cock. Also very distracting.

"Right," Eggsy says, voice wobbling pathetically. "Okay. It really ain't that hard - _difficult_. I just wanna get nice and wet. When I think I done enough, I do a bit more. And the dick just fucking slides in there like a dream. That's pretty much it."

"And the fingers?" Harry asks softly. His hand drifts from Eggsy's cock down between the ungainly V of his legs, leaving a shining wet trail over his balls and the inside of his thigh. "May I?"

"Yeah. Fuck, _please_." He moves his own hand and lets Harry take over, chewing his lower lip raw with the effort not to yell the house down at the steady, gorgeous slide of Harry's long finger pushing inside his body. "Ain't you done this to yourself?"

"Never. I'm beginning to feel I've wasted my life."

Eggsy laughs, trembling and breathless. "Mate."

"I promise you'll be the first to know when it happens." He wets his fingers again - fast learner - and spends a few more minutes with that brow-furrowed look of concentration on his handsome face, fingertip twisting and thrusting slowly. "Do you need another?"

"Whatever you like. Don't need it, you can open me up on your nice fat cock if you want." Eggsy suspects Harry - with all his hedonism and his endless store of double entendres - might be the sort to go for a little bit of brazen dirty talk, but doesn't quite anticipate the sudden flash of fire in Harry's eyes.

"Alright."

"Alright," Eggsy echoes, cocky grin firmly in place and only faltering when Harry slips a second fingertip inside him anyway. His mouth drops open then, spilling out a throaty ridiculous moan; it feels like an earthquake rumbling through him right down his throat and naked body to the point there they're joined, where Harry's thick wet fingers are sliding clumsily in and out of him. "Turn your hand like - yeah, and push up a bit, can you feel a bit that's like - _fuck_ , fuck, right there, that's it, that's nice. When you're doing your fifty years of catch-up that's exactly where you wanna go." He licks his dry lips, tasting the tang of sweat. "Tilde used to go to fucking town up there with a vibrator, thought I was gonna die. I'm gonna find you some shopping links - next time you got a day off I don't wanna see you leave that bedroom til you're sobbing and all your limbs ain't working."

"It all sounds terribly impractical," Harry says, even as he's running his huge hands down Eggsy's thighs to encourage them back around his hips. "I'm afraid I'll hurt you."

"If it hurts you're doing it wrong. I don't believe you ever done anything wrong in your whole life."

"Your opinion of me is flattering but will ultimately end in disappointment."

"Bull fucking shit," Eggsy says bluntly, and winds one arm around Harry's neck to draw him down for a ferocious kiss while the other fumbles blindly for the lube. Harry's cock feels gorgeous in his dripping hand, so hard it's almost thrumming; this probably won't last too long, but maybe that's not such a bad thing. Maybe if he gets it out of his system he'll be better next time, if there's a next time. "Take it slow. I'll yell if it's too much. But gotta be honest, pretty sure it won't be. I been fucking ready for you since five minutes after I met you."

" _Christ_ ," Harry says reverently, and pulls Eggsy onto his cock.

There's no pain, just the familiar, overwhelming sense of fullness, and Eggsy presses desperate dimples into the small of Harry's back with all his fingertips and also gnaws a bit on his shoulder for good measure, which makes Harry curse so fluently and beautifully it sounds like Shakespeare. "That's like one inch," Eggsy says, breathless against Harry's salty skin, "now gimme the next eleven."

Harry's laughing, breathless too, trembling above Eggsy where he's holding himself propped on one forearm while the other hand between them awkwardly runs a curious fingertip around the place where they're joined. "Five if you're lucky. Is this alright?"

"Ain't that much different from fucking a girl, is it?"

"There's a whole world of difference." A sigh catches hard in Harry's throat when he slides another few inches deeper, a quiet little noise of wonder. "Please, is this alright? Am I hurting you?"

"No. Harry, you're doing amazing. You can move a bit." He tries to direct, hands clutching Harry's hips to urge him out and back in, slow and firm, deeper than before. "Slow, just for now. Like that. Is that good?"

"Mmm," Harry says, concentrating too hard for real words. He's frowning, eyes half-closed; Eggsy can't help wondering whether he truly means that, or he's too caught up in it being his first time to actually be having fun.

"Alright. You're doing great. Just do whatever feels good, yeah?"

It takes him a minute but he figures it all out with the same speed he learns everything else: the motions, the placement of his hands and knees, a broken sort of rhythm that picks up speed and slows down and stops and starts almost at random and feels so fucking _good_ that Eggsy's afraid he might come again from that and the slick slide of Harry's belly on his cock before Harry's even come once, which seems a bit unfair and a lot embarrassing considering he's supposed to be the expert here.

"So you wanna do this to Hamish or you want Hamish to do this to you?" he says as conversationally as he can manage with a cock rammed halfway up his digestive system, and above him Harry shudders suddenly and makes the most glorious, hungry little sound Eggsy thinks he's ever heard.

"It doesn't matter, I just... it's ridiculous, it doesn't matter."

"You can pretend I'm him if you want."

"You're very short," Harry says, a fleeting grin passing over his flushed face until Eggsy bites his shoulder again in retaliation; Harry stops then, fully inside, and his breath is hot and wet and noisy against Eggsy's neck when he ducks to hide his face there. "I'll finish very soon, I'm afraid. What's the etiquette for that?"

"Etiquette," Eggsy repeats, bordering on laughter because it's just such a fucking _Harry_ thing to say. "No such thing when you're balls-deep up people's arses. You just ask. People like different things."

Harry raises his head from its hiding place, settling the cup of his hand against Eggsy's jaw and cheek to hold him steadier against the thrusting below, and searches his eyes for a moment. "What do you like?"

"Come on me," Eggsy says at once. It's something he always felt a bit weird about enjoying so much until Tilde found out and spent half a year telling him how fucking hot she thought it was. "If you want."

"On you," Harry says curiously. His movements slow and halt, then he carefully withdraws and kneels up between Eggsy's sprawled legs, peeling off the condom to wrap his handsome fingers tight around his cock. He starts stroking rapidly, tracing a path with his eyes from Eggsy's hand on his own cock stroking in time, up the muscle ridges and freckles and sweat of his body to his face. "Where?"

"Anywhere." He can feel the rising heat of his second orgasm begin to flicker through him, making all his extremities tingle, and presses the other palm flat against the line of hair descending from his navel to his cock. "Here. Do it, fucking mark me--"

His words cut short, stuck in his throat alongside a heaving moan that threatens to choke him as he comes again over his fingers, and through his eyelashes as he's trying to catch his breath he sees Harry's perfect posture slump and the splash of his come overshoot his target by several inches to land in drips and puddles on Eggsy's chest, a patch collecting in the dip of his collarbone.

" _Harry_ ," is all he manages to say before Harry's on him again, kissing him clumsily all over his face and murmuring "My god, you incredible treasure," against Eggsy's mouth while the smears of sweat and semen turn sticky and cool between the press of their bodies.

For a while they doze, then Eggsy starts awake from some weird half-dream to find Harry watching him from the next pillow, smiling lazily like an overindulged cat. He feels disgusting, grimy and tired and the really nice lingering sort of sore, but the only thing he wants more than a shower is to stay right here a while longer just gazing at that look on Harry's face.

"Not that scary, right?" Eggsy says, and Harry's smile spreads a fraction wider into the rare, giddy one that's all teeth and dimples.

"Terrifying. Thank you for being so patient."

"You wanna be on the bottom next time?"

"Next time," Harry repeats, eyebrows raising and a note of suppressed laughter in his voice. He reaches for Eggsy, drawing him closer and burying his nose in his sweaty hair for a good pervy sniff.

"What, you got someone better in mind?"

"I've been advised to try Grindr," Harry says innocently, then the held-back laugh bursts out of him into the stuffy silence of the bedroom, propelled by Eggsy's elbow in his ribs.

 

* * *

 

On one of their junk shop trips a while ago Eggsy found a horrible old resin figurine of King Kong holding Ann Darrow in one massive monster hand, and he couldn't help himself, he snarkily said to Harry, "Look - Kay and Roxy," until the unimpressed look on Harry's face made him put it back and skulk off to look at some doilies instead.

He remembers it suddenly now when he steps under an arch of roses in the HQ gardens and finds them sitting in a sunny corner on a tartan picnic blanket to save their grey suits from grass stains. Roxy's slipped her shoes off and she's leaning back against the plinth of the carved stone bird bath, her stockinged feet curled up beneath her. Kay's discarded his jacket somewhere and he's got his shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows, his massive stupid potato head resting in Roxy's lap. He's eating an apple and holding it up every few bites to offer her some, and they're both reading faded old paperbacks in the dappled flowery light streaming down through the trees.

"Sorry," Eggsy says automatically and turns to leave them alone, but Roxy says, "Oh shit, what time is it?" and then he's stuck, he has to go over and answer.

"Only half twelve."

"Good, I thought you were coming to hustle us to the meeting." She shades her eyes with her hand and smiles at him. The fingers of the other, Eggsy notices, are resting on Kay's obnoxiously huge chest, absently stroking the silken stripes of his tie.

"Nope. Just wandering. Arthur's got called to a thing with some investor, meeting's cancelled so I ain't got nothing to do til my mission tonight."

"You could tidy your bombsite office," Roxy suggests, but the glint in her eyes says she doesn't really mean it.

"Like yours is any better," Kay says lazily, sliding his fingers over Roxy's wrist and completely eclipsing her hand with his own. "Pretty sure I saw new civilisations sprouting up in those old coffee cups on your desk."

"Well, that settles it. I can't possibly commit genocide. The filth stays."

Kay huffs a quiet sound of laughter out of his nose and turns Roxy's hand over to kiss the inside of her wrist. There's something sweet and unselfconscious about it, he's probably not even really aware he's doing it. Eggsy feels a faraway ache somewhere remembering Tilde: the way he used to play with her hair while they were lounging around watching telly, and the sleepy snuffly kisses she used to bump off his naked shoulder any time she got up for a pee in the night and accidentally woke him.

"You wanna take the horses out this afternoon?" Eggsy asks suddenly. Roxy offered to teach him to ride months ago and he's been putting it off for ages, partly because he can't bear the certainty that he's going to suck at something Kay's brilliant at, partly because he's been shit scared of the bloody things ever since being kicked by one on a school trip to some grubby little farm in Year Eight. "Not if you're busy, obviously. Just I dunno when our days off are gonna match up again."

"Go ahead," Kay says when Roxy glances down at him. He takes the last crunch of his apple, wipes the juice off his lips with the heel of his hand, and throws the core with flawless precision into the open picnic basket near his feet. "Merlin's gonna kick my ass if I don't finish my report on that dang watch upgrade anyways."

Takes a pining loser to know a pining loser, Eggsy thinks, clocking the disappointed look in Kay's eyes despite the way he tries to cover it with his usual easy smile and air of complacent disinterest. It's a pigs-flying, blue-moon miracle, but he's actually sympathising with the guy; maybe Harry's patience and bizarre affection for him is rubbing off on Eggsy at last, maybe he's finally done sulking like a brat about something that makes his best mate happier than he's ever seen her. Whatever it is, it's fucking overdue and he's embarrassed at himself for dragging it out this long.

"Fuck it," Eggsy says to Kay, "I ain't done mine yet either. Won't kill her to wait a bit longer. I _know_ you wanna see me make a total dickhead of myself."

There's the briefest pause as though Kay's waiting for the other shoe to drop, then he drawls, "Come on, man, I see that every day," with a teasing smile that lights up his entire stupid handsome giant face.

Four years later Kay asks Eggsy to be his best man. This is where it starts.

 

* * *

 

The palace looks like something from a fairytale, chandeliers twinkling from the high ceilings like a million distant stars and masses of velvety white roses everywhere. Out of sight in one of the side rooms someone's plinking away at a harpsichord, and as Eggsy makes his way down the hall the music fades to a string quartet playing from somewhere else. He'd sell his soul for a JD and coke, but the champagne glass he grabs off a passing tray is something to hold on to at least even if its contents taste like cat piss. There's something almost mnemonic about the crystal coolness against his fingers, bringing to mind that first bizarre morning in Harry's house when he'd tried to learn how to use escargot cutlery and how not to gag at the slippery, salty horror of an oyster in the throat.

"Disappointing. I thought you might wear orange."

The voice comes from Eggsy's left, and he's smiling helplessly even before he turns enough to see her. Tilde is sitting a few steps up on a staircase, the skirt of her white gown bunched around her until she unfurls herself to her feet and it settles, draping like liquid, the scalloped pattern of thousands of tiny beads all glinting in the candelabra light from either side.

The added height of her heels and the lowest step she's standing on means Eggsy has to raise up on tiptoe to reach her cheek with his lips. He can feel her smiling, then the delighted breath of her laughter when he murmurs against her flushed skin, "You look like a mermaid. This is amazing."

"It was my great-grandmother's. It should really be in a museum."

"It should be exactly where it is."

It's weeks since they've seen each other - they've both been too busy with work for anything except Whatsapp and one raucous night watching the Drag Race finale over Skype with Roxy and Jamal from four different countries - and suddenly having her this close again is making his heart feel fluttery. _It's not even about missing her or wanting her or nothing_ , he tried to explain a few days ago, drying the dinner pots as Harry washed them and let him ramble. _She just makes me so fucking happy, all the time. It don't even matter if we ain't together. Just remembering she exists I'm like, yeah, the world's a good place_. Much easier to think like that when there's the entire width of the North Sea separating them, dulling the splintering hurt of the fracture.

She's looking at him like she's trying to learn every freckle and lash and curve of his face, like she doesn't know it already. He wonders if she feels it too: the insidious whisper from who knows where that this is a strange, magical night and strange, magical things might be permitted to happen even after the stroke of midnight. Her fingertips are stroking the edge of his lapel - black this time, not orange - the way she used to drowsily stroke the ones on his Kingsman pyjamas when she was falling asleep.

"I should go and be a princess," she says softly, close enough that Eggsy can smell the perfume on her warm skin, but she makes no move to leave.

"Gotta be honest, I'm kinda being a spy tonight too," he confesses, just as softly. She steps down, the same height as him now in her heels on the parquetry, and Eggsy's hand finds her waist after he puts down his glass, his thumb sliding gently over a curve of tiny crystals there that feels soaked with the warmth of her body just a millimetre of satin away. "We got feelers out on the Russian ambassador, word on the street says he's up to all sorts."

Tilde smiles at that, at first sort of sadly before it morphs to wry amusement. "These silly lives are never, ever going to fit together, are they?"

Eggsy shrugs, curling both arms around her body to pull her closer. "Nope."

"The really annoying thing is I can't imagine them ever _not_ fitting together either."

"Right. It's fucked up."

"Eggsy, will you marry me?"

He takes a few steps backwards, drawing her with him until they're hidden from the main hallway behind some voluminous drapery, and throws every lingering bit of love and frustration into kissing her.

"Not now," she says against his mouth, even as he's nodding; he understands somehow before she says it, and doesn't need a single moment of time to consider his answer. "When you retire. When you're sixty or eighty or a hundred and ten. Get out of that shop and straight on a plane to me."

" _Yes_ ," he promises, then backtracks at once because even now, even with her encircled in his arms and his lungs full of her perfume there's a part of him that needs to at least attempt a grip on reality. "Don't wait around, though. You'll find someone else. You gotta fucking go for it when you do, I swear I'll be happy for you."

Tilde makes a humming, hedging sort of noise and kisses him again: on his mouth, and his cheek, and on the third finger of his hand when she raises it to her mouth, right on the spot a wedding ring would lie if they were any other two people in the world. "Sure. You, too. But _right now_ , until further notice, there's my work and there's you and I don't care we can't make these pieces fit."

"My work and you," Eggsy echoes, and laughs shakily against the elaborately pinned swoops and curls of Tilde's hair when she rests her forehead against his shoulder like they're swept up in some swoony sentimental last dance at the end of a school disco. "Pretty much sums it up, yeah."

Even more than the kisses, even more than the spectacular sex, this is the part he's been missing: just the closeness of her, the brush of her breath on his skin, the way her fingers are always hungry for some bit of fabric or curl of his hair to play with. The scatter of freckles across her nose that she usually hides with foundation, and the glisten of them being revealed under a makeup wipe every night like a weird, ridiculous striptease. All the stupid memes she laughs at, the glorious greedy way she eats cream cakes, the incredible bedtime stories she used to make up on the spot when they babysat Daisy. Tilde the scatterbrained writer who absently twists her hair up with a biro when she's working on a speech or an article and then turns the house upside-down trying to find her lost pen, and Tilde the future queen who can silence a room with nothing but her presence and then lead discussions about mending the broken world.

"Okay," she says eventually, raising her head from Eggsy's shoulder and giving him a brilliant, luminous smile that makes his nose ache up high with the fleeting threat of idiotic tears. "We should both get back to work. Is my lipstick all over my chin?"

Eggsy rubs the pink smears with his thumb until she looks half-decent. "Not any more. Harry's around somewhere, he was charming your mum last I saw. Wanna meet him?"

"He came!" She looks delighted, though her face quickly shifts to something with a very familiar, absurdly charming hint of deviousness as she takes Eggsy's offered arm. "I don't know. If my plan worked, he probably won't want to be disturbed."

"Alright, what are you playing at?" He scans the crowds looking for Harry, wondering if he might have headed into one of the music rooms or the main ballroom already - then all at once he sees him, and also the person he's staring at in open-mouthed surprise. "Holy fuck, that's--"

"Merlin. I mean, Ginger."

"Pretty sure we can call him Hamish tonight."

He's solidly on first name terms with Harry at least, if the way they're pushing through the crowd towards each other is anything to go by. There's a teetering moment of stillness when they're face to face, then Harry takes one final step and flings his arms around his friend so ferociously that Hamish stumbles a bit on his prostheses and grabs on around Harry's waist. It's partly to steady himself, but the spread and press of his fingers clinging to the fabric of Harry's jacket and the way one creeps up his spine to clutch desperately at the back of his hair suggests there's all sorts of tempests going on inside that magnificent brain of his.

"He didn't even do that when we thought Hamish was about to die," Eggsy murmurs to Tilde. It feels like a shockingly private thing to be spying on, even though they're in a palace surrounded by hundreds of people. "Just kinda patted his shoulder, all repressed."

"Looks like you fucked the repression right out of him," Tilde whispers in his ear, lingering lasciviously over the word _fucked_.

Eggsy can feel his cheeks reddening immediately, caught somewhere between laughing and protesting. "I fucking never shoulda told you about that."

"Are you crazy? It's my favourite thing you've ever said."

"Yeah, well. Remember it, cos"--he glances again at Harry and Hamish, still clinging to each other like they're drowning--"pretty sure it won't be happening again."

Eggsy feels the lightest brush of Tilde's fingertips against the skin of his wrist as she releases his arm. "Go and say hi. I'll come and find you later, okay?"

He nods and she fades away into the crowd, visibly morphing over the course of five or so steps from the Tilde he knows to the Crown Princess; there's something straighter about her spine and more piercing about her eyes as she greets people and accepts a glass of champagne before passing out of sight into the ballroom.

For a minute Eggsy stays where he is, standing near the wall and gazing up at the paintings and vases opposite. To anybody who happens to glance at him he must look as though he's admiring the art; there are only two other people in the room who know what his glasses do, and they're far too busy trying to cram thirty years of feelings into one massively overdue hug to pay him any attention.

His eyes track out a message: _rox look at this im crying :')_

He blinks to send both that and a snapshot of the hug to Roxy, who's been hoping for a satisfactory end to this excruciating drama for as long as he has.

Then he leaves them to it, and goes to find his suspect.


End file.
